Birth Control in Russia

Published: September 2, 2003

For 50 years, Russian women relied on state-financed abortions as their main form of birth control. With pills, condoms and other contraceptives often in short supply, most women in Russia expected to face at least one and sometimes more than a dozen trips to the abortion clinic over their childbearing years. Now the Russian government is attempting to slow the abortion rate. It is an admirable goal, given the toll that multiple abortions have taken on the health and fertility of Russia's women. Unfortunately, the Health Ministry has gone about it in the wrong way. It has decided to limit Russian women's access to abortion rather than expanding their ability to get effective contraception and better family planning.

Russia's abortion rate, among the highest in the world during the last decades of the Soviet era, has already begun to drop as more effective contraceptives have finally become available, especially in urban areas. In 1988, as the Soviet years were ending, there were 4.6 million abortions, compared with 1.7 million last year. But conservative lawmakers and Orthodox leaders have begun pushing to cut those numbers even further.

Many of these same leaders and their friends in the Russian Duma have helped end federal financing for family-planning clinics, which dispense vital information on abortions and alternatives like contraception, as well as on safe sex. Experts on women's health understandably see a dangerous combination. Without enough information on birth control or access to abortions, Russian women could return to back-street charlatans for the kind of botched, unsanitary procedures that once killed many.

More troubling is the widespread suspicion that this decree is another attempt at Soviet-style population manipulation. In 1936, Stalin banned abortion to stimulate the birth rate. In a widely resented decree that was dropped after his death, Stalin made it clear that the nation's couples should produce workers and soldiers as vigorously as new Soviet industries were turning out trucks and steel beams.

Russia today is facing a real population crisis as young people emigrate, those who stay have fewer children and the life expectancy of men is falling. Russia's population, now 145 million, is shrinking by almost 700,000 annually -- a predicament that President Vladimir Putin has called a ''creeping catastrophe.''

The answer to a declining population is not curbs on abortions. As Dr. Lyudmila Timofeyeva, a prominent Moscow gynecologist, told The Christian Science Monitor, ''Once a woman has made up her mind to have an abortion, she will find a way.'' The way may become increasingly dangerous for women if the government arbitrarily curtails medically safe abortions.